Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday April 01, 2013 @10:00AM
from the trying-something-new dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, and a champion of free and open source software has finally called it a day and has agreed to join Microsoft as the project head of the upcoming Windows 9 project. According to Bloomberg, Linus will be working on a new Kernel design for Microsoft that will make, usually vulnerable, Windows OS virtually impossible to be infected by viruses and malware."

I haven't really cared much about Linus' philosophy, so I may be way off on this, but I'm under the impression that Linus cares most about the users having machines that work well to do whatever they want. That's different from Apple's view (machines that work cleanly to do what we want) and the Microsoft view (machines that do what vendors want, regardless of how messy the implementation), and the GNU view (machines that the user can use to build what they want).

If Linus were to head Windows 9, I might just forgive Microsoft for the past few decades. Linus comes with his notorious vitriol for sloppy implementation, so I could expect a cleaner API that might survive more than three years before Microsoft deems it "too limiting" and replaces it. His complete detachment from current Windows architecture would also promise a Unix-based Windows, much like Classic Mac OS was replaced by a Unix core for OS X. I might just actually enjoy that... Bash, rather than PowerShell. Executable commands, rather than COM, ActiveX, or OLE. Strict configuration files, rather than the corruption-prone registry...

President Lincoln filled his cabinet with people who opposed each other and the President himself. His meetings were filled with opposing viewpoints, from which the best were selected. Microsoft is in a position to make a similar pride-swallowing decision, but I doubt it will ever happen.